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Where o where are my mobile developers?

As I pack to go to our BlackBerry Jam Europe, I’m reminded that there’s always a debate over how many developers there are in the world. I’ve seen over the years refinements of developer trackers and developer census, I’m not going to begin to try to slice and dice that data in this post. But, this counting gets even more controversial when you begin filtering for categories, like maybe mobile developers?

So, I have an interesting different set of metrics to share. To meet with developers where they live, over the last year I traveled literally around the globe. Several times over. In addition, my BlackBerry evangelism team (not just me…) logged 2.5 million miles. And if you consider that I have my team spread out home based in 19 tech centers around the globe, and we did 44 developer conferences in over 30 countries you may think I have it covered. Last year when I started at BlackBerry, this is exactly what I would have believed.

For completeness, what’s the number of countries in the world? The Internet tells me that the UN has 192 members and that the US State Department recognizes 194. So what percentage of these countries has a developer that’s submitted an app for BlackBerry 10? 10% maybe? That’s close to the number of countries my team reside in. Being generous, maybe as high as 20%?

The actual number is 55%! We have seen apps submitted from 106 countries from around the world. Analysts have claimed that all our apps are all coming from former BBOS developers. Not true, at launch we already have much broader global developer support for BlackBerry 10 than BBOS.

Everywhere I go, I meet with Government and University officials. Countries big and small are all investing in Computer Science curriculum, and this is confirmation that it’s working. Mobile software development is truly a global phenomenon. Opportunity calls. Are you ready?